Warning Signs

Alan Caruba's blog is a daily look at events, personalities, and issues from an independent point of view. Copyright, Alan Caruba, 2015. With attribution, posts may be shared. A permission request is welcome. Email acaruba@aol.com.

Thursday, June 11, 2015

The
Wednesday, June 10 Wall Street Journal headline at the top of the page was
“Obama Set to Expand Troops in Iraq.”We
were 589 days into the two terms Barack Hussein Obama has served in the office
of President of the United States and he is as clueless now as he was when he
arrived on January 20, 2009.

“President
Barack Obama is poised to send hundreds more American advisers to a new base in
a strategic Iraqi region to help devise a counterattack against marauding
Islamic State militants, U.S. officials said Tuesday, a shift that underscores
American concern over recent battlefield losses.” It’s 450 “trainers.”

We have
had losses because (1) Obama was elected on a promise to end the conflict in
Iraq and (2) reelected by pulling out troops to the point that the remaining
Iraqi troops—Shiites in the south—decided it wasn’t worth dying for their
leaders. Can’t say I blame them, but dying at the hands of ninth century
Islamic fanatics is the fate that threatens the entire Middle East, not just
Iraq or what’s left of it.

This is
how we lost the war in Vietnam. There was a time when Americans utterly
destroyed their enemies on the battlefield. In the latter half of the last
century, starting in Korea, we forgot how to do that and why that’s how wars
are won.

In all
candor, like a lot of Americans, I went back and forth about the Mideast
conflicts. Looking back, I think George H.W. Bush showed remarkable insight
when, after driving Iraq’s Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait, he stopped at the
border and came home. George W. had the notion he could somehow introduce
democracy to the region. He couldn’t and it will likely never really occur
there because Islam is the only law and it has kept the region ignorant,
backward, and under the thumb of tyrants for centuries.

The
Islamic State troops must be stopped at some point, but Obama is not the
President who will do it. Whatever U.S. backed combat occurs will be just
enough to present enough television news images to convince the gullible that
progress is being made.

Obama
arrived in office without any strategy and has spent the last six and a half
years “muddling through” as the British say. He and the Democratic Party had
only one goal; to win the elections. After that, they wanted to “fundamentally
transform” the greatest nation on planet Earth. They have largely made a mess
out of everything they touched from ObamaCare to Common Core.

There’s a
reason why Obama will send more troops and that’s because every one of our
allies has told him that, if the U.S. does not again assert its role of global
leadership, they are not going to cooperate with him in a thousand different
ways.

Our allies
in the Mideast have told him they lack the military strength (and will) to
conduct any kind of war with ISIS. The U.S. and much of the rest of the world
cannot afford to sit by and let the enormous oil wealth and reserves of the
Mideast come under the control of ISIS.

So, once
again we read headlines about U.S. troops returning to the Mideast.

What that
means is that the 2016 elections are more critical to the future of the
nation than all previous ones.

I think
Americans, liberals, conservatives and independents alike have had more than
enough of President No Strategy. I think there are enough older Americans who
remember and take pride in a nation that was unabashedly the world’s leader in
the pursuit of peace and democracy. And I think that the thirty percent or so
of brain-dead liberals are not sufficient to affect the outcome of a 2016
election devoted to restoring the nation’s economy and leadership.

It can be
done. John F. Kennedy was on his way to doing so. Reagan did so. In 590 days
from now, we can begin to do so again.

Wednesday, June 10, 2015

On
Thursday and Friday, June 11-12, there will be a gathering of some of the
nation’s and the world’s leading climate change “skeptics” in Washington, D.C.
and joining them will be members of Congress and their staffs. The Tenth
International Conference on Climate Change will occur and the odds are that the
mainstream media, as it has done for all the previous conferences, will do its
best to ignore it.

In
attendance as well will be scores of scientists, economists, and policy experts
for a conference being held just two blocks from a White House in which the
President of the United States resides while lying about “climate change” as
the greatest threat to the planet.

In March,
the Gallup Poll revealed that “Although climate scientists have been in the
news describing this winter as a strong signal that global warming is producing
more extreme weather, Americans are no more likely today (55%) than in the past
two years to believe the effects of global warming are occurring.”

The
Conference is sponsored by The Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based free-market
think tank and, while most of us have heard of the Rand Corporation or the
Heritage Foundation, Heartland is one of the those power houses that labors
without the “image” accorded others.

Founded in
1984, it has a full-time staff of 31 with approximately 235 academics and
professional economists who participate in its peer-review process, plus more
than 160 elected officials who serve on its Legislative Forum. In addition to
the environment, its scholars also focus on education, health, budget and tax
issues.

I have
been a Heartland policy analyst for so long I can’t recall when I joined.
Approximately 8,300 supporters contribute to its annual budget of $6 million. It
does not accept government funding.

Without
your knowing it, the nine conferences that preceded the current one have had a
dramatic impact on your life and wallet. For one thing, you’re not being robbed
by a “carbon tax” aimed at “reducing greenhouse gases.” On the other hand, you
may be at risk of losing a coal-fired plant that provides your electricity if
the Environmental Protection Agency is allowed to continue its vile attack on
our energy resources.

It has
been Heartland and a handful of other think tanks that labored to inform the
public about the science that utterly debunked the lies about “global warming”
and now works to do the same for those applied to “climate change.”Heartland’s power is seen in its conferences.

The
problem for Heartland and the rest of us is that we are up against the U.S.
government whose Obama administration is completely committed to the lies;
agency by agency within the government have budgets and programs to continue to
telling the lies. Beyond them is the entire system of government schools and,
beyond them, much of the higher education community.

In early
June the Daily Caller reported that “National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration scientists have found a solution to the 15-year ‘pause’ in
global warming: They ‘adjusted’ the hiatus in warming out of the temperature
record.”This is what Heartland and
others have been fighting against and exposing since the global warming hoax
began in the late 1980s. And we are beginning to see the Congress respond.

As
reported by CNS News, appropriators in the House of Representatives have let it
be known that they are taking aim at one of the Obama administration’s most
cherished priorities—international climate change funding. An appropriations
bill for the State Department and foreign operations excluded the Green Climate
Fund, the Clean Technology Fund, and the Strategic Climate Fund, while also
removing funding for the U.SN-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
That’s millions in U.S. taxpayer funding that will not be wasted on the climate
change hoax.

The
Conference will honor some of the world’s leading “skeptics”—the alarmists call
them “denier.” They include Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) as the winner of the
Political Leadership on Climate Change Award, sponsored by the Heritage
Foundation. My friend, Robert M. Carter, Ph.D. will receive Heartland’s
Lifetime Achievement in Climate Science award. Others whom you may not have
heard of include William Happer, Ph.D., David Legates, Ph.D., and Anthony
Watts, all of whom have been on the front lines of the battle for the truth about
the planet’s climate.

An entire
generation has grown up and graduated from college since the first lies about
global warming were unleashed. That’s how long Heartland and others have
labored to present the truth. If the media fails to take notice of this week’s
conference, you will know that the battle will continue for a long time to
come.

Tuesday, June 9, 2015

The
president of the Space and Science Research Corporation, John Casey, is also
the author of “Cold Sun: A Dangerous ‘Hibernation’ of the Sun Has Begun!” and
has called attention to a meteorological cycle that until the global warming
hoax occurred, was largely unknown to many people and, to a large degree still
is.

Nature has
not cooperated with the charlatans who made claims about a dramatic warming of
the Earth. Since 1998 the planet along with the Sun has been in a solar cycle
distinguished by very few, if any, sun spots—evidence of solar storms—and a
cooling of the Earth that has some predicting a forthcoming new Little Ice Age.

As
Wikipedia reports: “Solar Cycle 24 is the
24th solar cycle since 1755, when extensive recording of solar sunspot activity
began. It is the current solar cycle, and began on January 4, 2008, but there
was minimal activity until early 2010. It is on track to be the Solar Cycle
with the lowest recorded sunspot activity since accurate records began in 1750.”
These cycles occur every eleven years.

I was surprised to receive a news release from the Space and Science Research Corporation (SSRC) on Monday with the headline “Earthquake
and Volcano Threat Increases” because, frankly, I could have put out the same
release and, if such activity did increase, I could claim credit for predicting
it and, if not, few if any would recall I had made such a claim. While
earthquake activity has been studied for decades, even the U.S. Geological
Survey (USGS) makes no claim to being able to predicting when or where one will
occur.

What the USGS can tell you is that their scientists (and
others) “estimate earthquake probabilities in two ways: by studying the history
of large earthquakes in a specific area and the rate at which strain
accumulates in the rock.”A translation
of this is that they have only the most minimal clues when and where one will
occur. A recent International Business Times article reported that this may
change as the introduction of “big data analytics” kicks in to provide “a leap
of accuracy of quake predictions.”

The SSRC news
release was about a letter that Casey had sent Craig Fugate, the Administrator
of the Federal Management Agency which “disclosed that we are about to enter a
potentially catastrophic period of record earthquakes and volcanic eruptions
throughout the United States.”

Casey’s
letter outlined “how the ongoing dramatic reduction in the Sun’s energy output
will not only plunge the world into a decades-long cold epoch, but at the same
time bring record geographic devastation in monster earthquakes and volcanic
eruptions.”

Other
scientists have come to similar conclusions, but after years of sorting through
all the claims about global warming and “climate change”, one might want to
tread lightly before embracing them.

I asked my
colleague at The Heartland Institute, Science Director Jay Lehr, for his reaction
and he was quite candid. “I have read it and am extremely skeptical. It sounds
like the agency is looking for some press and, of course, when they turn out to
be wrong no one will be upset. No harm. No foul. Being ready for earthquakes in
known quake zones makes sense; creating unwarranted fear does not.”

Dr. Lehr
summed up my own reaction. I would recommend his skepticism to everyone.

Will there
be earthquakes here in the U.S.? Yes. The New Madrid earthquakes were the
biggest in the nation’s history, occurring in the central Mississippi Valley
and so large they were felt as far away as New York and Boston, Montreal and
Washington, D.C.President James Madison
and his wife Dolly felt them in the White House. They lasted from December 16,
1811 through March of 1812 and there were more than 2,000 quakes in the central
Midwest, and between 6,000-10,000 in the boot-heel of Missouri where New Madrid
is located near the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers.

When will
new earthquakes or volcanic eruptions occur? I doubt anyone knows the answer to
that.

Sunday, June 7, 2015

It doesn’t
matter that Bruce Jenner, famed Olympic athlete and member of the Kardashian
family, thinks that he is female. He can never be female no matter what surgery
he undertakes to make it reflect the fantasy in his head. Born a male, his body
is a billion cells and nerve contacts whose DNA determines his true gender.

That’s why
those who are buying into the pop cultural myth and news coverage of Jenner’s
announced transformation should be greeted “Hello, Sucker!”It’s worse than just plain stupidity; it is
the tip of a massive effort to alter society that dates back to those arrogant and
deluded founders of communism who thought that, for it to succeed, the family
as a key element of all societies, had to be eliminated.

Dr. Paul
Kengor, Ph.D., is a leading scholar on Communism and the author, among other
excellent books, of “Dupes: How America’s Adversaries Have Manipulated
Progressives for a Century” and, just out, “Takedown: From Communists to
Progressives, How the Left Has sabotaged Family and Marriage.”($18.95, WND Books, softcover)

The only
way progressives—communists—know how to advance their agenda is to lie about it
in every way. Even a short look at the lives of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels,
the authors of Communist manifesto, Das
Kapital, tells you what motivated their wish to destroy the family.

As Dr.
Kengor points out, Engels had written that he “favored that marriage should not
be a legal relationship, but a purely private affairs” noting that Engels “revealed
a highly promiscuous attitude toward sexual morality and marital relationships.”
Between the two men, they had many mistresses. Of the six children Marx
fathered, four died before he did and two committed suicide. Both men leached
off of Engel’s inheritance, never working a day in their lives. Marx’s family
finally refused to lend him a dime; in brief, two men with a disdain for traditional
marriage and widely held Judeo-Christian moral values.

Therefore,
to understand why we are drowning in anti-family propaganda and efforts to
change the laws affecting what marriage is and is not, Dr. Kengor notes that “Even
way back when, in the mid-1800s, the far left had its sights on the family,
with marriage at its epicenter. And this particular component of the extreme
left—the communist left—was devoutly atheistic in its orientation ambition, and
mission. It rebelled against God, a rebellion against the Creator that was central
to its new direction and fundamental transformation.”

“Fundamental
transformation”? Where have we heard that term before? Oh yes, from President
Barack Obama’s lips. This was the candidate for President who said marriage was
strictly between a man and a woman before he was elected and “evolved” into
supporting same-sex marriage. Hello, Sucker!

“Same-sex
marriage,” says Dr. Kengor “is hardly a Marxist plot, a latent communist
conspiracy. It is, however, a crucial final blow to marriage—the only blow that
is enabling a formal, legal redefinition that will unravel the institution”, adding that
“what the left has steadfastly said and written and done to marriage and
the family over the last two centuries cannot be ignored.”

“Much of
the wider American culture, outside of the far left, has also become secular
and dismissive of traditional religious teaching on matters such as family and
marriage…The radical left could never have achieved this ultimate takedown of
marriage without the larger American public’s broad acceptance of gay marriage.”
If you can believe that two men or two women can and should get married, than
you will believe anything. In five thousand years of civilization, we are close
to letting all of the moral and civil lessons learned in the past be ignored,
forgotten or rewritten.

We have,
as a society, been tending more and more in this direction, dramatically when
the Supreme Court legalized abortion and, in its forthcoming decision on
same-sex marriage, likely a similar acceptance. When that occurs, our society
will be just decades away from a serious breakdown. As it is, more and more
children are growing up in single-parent family settings, lacking as often as
not, a father.

If you
want to look at men dressing and acting like women, tune in America’s most
famous drag queen, RuPaul’s television show. He’s male. Those on the show are
male.

There are
among us, men and women, whose sexual preference takes them in the direction of
their own gender. They constitute 1.8% if the U.S. population. There are those who, born
male, now claim to be female. That is their problem deserving of no special
laws or attention. Changing our entire society and culture to benefit this slim
nitch of society is a very bad idea.

Bruce
Jenner’s absurd claims will make him a rich man. Not a rich woman.

Saturday, June 6, 2015

Call it "the best medicine ever", but the donations that have come in this past week have been a big boost to my spirits as I recover from an operation that has left me unable to write my commentaries or have a normal life for now. I anticipate that I will be active again soon.

That's why, if you have been thinking about showing your support for "Warning Signs", this would be a good time to do so with my sincere, heartfelt thanks. -- Alan Caruba

Thursday, June 4, 2015

In the wake of a serious operation that will require rest and recovery, I thought I would offer "The best of" previous commentaries and will start with "Obama's Make-Believe Life" which, since posted on January 2, 2010 has gone viral. Enjoy.Obama's Make-Believe LifeBy
Alan Caruba (1/2/10)

I have this theory about Barack Obama. I think he’s led a
kind of make-believe life in which money was provided and doors were opened
because at some point early on somebody or some group took a look at this tall,
good looking, half-white, half-black, young man with an exotic African/Muslim
name and concluded he could be guided toward a life in politics where his facile
speaking skills could even put him in the White House.

In a very real
way, he has been a young man in a very big hurry. Who else do you know has
written two memoirs before the age of 45? “Dreams From My Father” was published
in 1995 when he was only 34 years old. The “Audacity of Hope” followed in 2006.
If, indeed, he did write them himself. There are some who think that his mentor
and friend, Bill Ayers, a man who calls himself a “communist with a small ‘c’”
was the real author.

His political skills consisted of rarely voting on
anything that might be deemed controversial. He went from a legislator in the
Illinois legislature to the Senator from that state because he had the good
fortune of having Mayor Daley’s formidable political machine at his disposal.

He was in the U.S. Senate so briefly that his bid for the presidency was
either an act of astonishing self-confidence or part of some greater game plan
that had been determined before he first stepped foot in the Capital. How, many
must wonder, was he selected to be a 2004 keynote speaker at the Democrat
convention that nominated John Kerry when virtually no one had ever even heard
of him before?

He outmaneuvered Hillary Clinton in primaries. He took
Iowa by storm. A charming young man, an anomaly in the state with a very small
black population, he oozed “cool” in a place where agriculture was the
antithesis of cool. He dazzled the locals. And he had an army of volunteers
drawn to a charisma that hid any real substance.

And then he had the
great good fortune of having the Republicans select one of the most inept
candidates for the presidency since Bob Dole. And then John McCain did something
crazy. He picked Sarah Palin, an unknown female governor from the very distant
state of Alaska. It was a ticket that was reminiscent of 1984’s Walter Mondale
and Geraldine Ferraro and they went down to defeat.

The mainstream
political media fell in love with him. It was a schoolgirl crush with febrile
commentators like Chris Mathews swooning then and now over the man. The venom
directed against McCain and, in particular, Palin, was
extraordinary.

Now, nearly a full year into his first term, all of those
gilded years leading up to the White House have left him unprepared to be
President. Left to his own instincts, he has a talent for saying the wrong thing
at the wrong time. It swiftly became a joke that he could not deliver even the
briefest of statements without the ever-present Tele-Prompters.

Far
worse, however, is his capacity to want to “wish away” some terrible realities,
not the least of which is the Islamist intention to destroy America and enslave
the West. Any student of history knows how swiftly Islam initially spread. It
knocked on the doors of Europe, having gained a foothold in Spain.

The
great crowds that greeted him at home or on his campaign “world tour” were no
substitute for having even the slightest grasp of history and the reality of a
world filled with really bad people with really bad intentions.

Oddly and
perhaps even inevitably, his political experience, a cakewalk, has positioned
him to destroy the Democrat Party’s hold on power in Congress because in the end
it was never about the Party. It was always about his communist ideology,
learned at an early age from family, mentors, college professors, and extreme
leftist friends and colleagues.

Obama is a man who could deliver a snap
judgment about a Cambridge, Massachusetts police officer who arrested an
“obstreperous” Harvard professor-friend, but would warn Americans against
“jumping to conclusions” about a mass murderer at Fort Hood who shouted “Allahu
Akbar.” The absurdity of that was lost on no one. He has since compounded this
by calling the Christmas bomber “an isolated extremist” only to have to admit a
day or two later that he was part of an al Qaeda plot.

He is a man who
could strive to close down our detention facility at Guantanamo even though
those released were known to have returned to the battlefield against America.
He could even instruct his Attorney General to afford the perpetrator of 9/11 a
civil trial when no one else would ever even consider such an obscenity. And he
is a man who could wait three days before having anything to say about the
perpetrator of yet another terrorist attack on Americans and then have to
elaborate on his remarks the following day because his first statement was so
lame.

The pattern repeats itself. He either blames any problem on the
Bush administration or he naively seeks to wish away the truth.

Knock,
knock. Anyone home? Anyone there? Barack Obama exists only as the sock puppet of
his handlers, of the people who have maneuvered and manufactured this pathetic
individual’s life.

When anyone else would quickly and easily produce a
birth certificate, this man has spent over a million dollars to deny access to
his. Most other documents, the paper trail we all leave in our wake, have been
sequestered from review. He has lived a make-believe life whose true facts
remain hidden.

We laugh at the ventriloquist’s dummy, but what do you do
when the dummy is President of the United States of America?

About Me

I am and have been for a long time a writer by profession. I have several books to my credit and my daily column, "Warning Signs", is disseminated on many Internet news and opinion websites, as well as blogs. In addition, I am a longtime book reviewer and have a blog offering a monthly report on new fiction and non-fiction.